I could almost already do that combining a raspberry pi, meerK40t, and and an M2 Nano. I have a couple not heavily tested emulation modes for Gcode. Which when I tried to run projects from the gcode driver in Visicut worked fine. I connected to pretend GRBL server that MeerK40t was pretending to be and ran my design. It cut out perfectly fine. I also have another project to do the emulation of Ruida, which currently turns that into svg path data when you connect to the fake Ruida server rather than directly controlling the laser. I bothered to reverse engineer all Ruida commands and all data properties. I even reverse engineered this weird app protocol Ruidas have. ( https://edutechwiki.unige.ch/en/Ruida#Commands ).
I might have Moshiboards also cracked. I dunno if I could write to a moshiboard and have it fooled (haven’t gotten around to writing and trying that, there’s a half-random half-command character set that might be something else) but I could have a board with some memory pretend to be a moshiboard. though here, it would also need it to look like CH341 chip.
The Ruida thing would work, the Moshi is mostly in jest. Ruida code is a lot better than Moshi code. I also bothered to reverse Leetro code, but didn’t bother beyond getting all the commands.
You could convert most the Ruida stuff pretty easily into a kinda of gcode. It’s not ascii but you if you could get a board to respond on UDP:50200 and 50207 it wouldn’t be that much gcode in general.
I think the only real charm in types of laser code, out there is lhymicro because it’s so entirely bare metal, it seems like higher level command things like ruida, gcode, and moshi, are all going to require some heftier processing. A line draw algorithm at a minimum.
@HalfNormal I think the question is: because the commands from the computer to the m2nano directly turn into stepper steps, the only adjustment would be in the software. Therefore, is there configuration for planar X/Y step rate in Meerk40t as there is for rotary?
Thanks for pointing that out! I answered this question when I was getting out of work and did not look to see where it had been posted! I know @Bill-CNC had been active in another area so I had just ASSUMED it had been somewhere else. Need to be paying more attention.
If that’s the actual question, you can go ahead and stretch any design or anything in MeerK40t. You can hit F9 and apply any transformations you want. It’ll give you as close to that as is possible but the steps will still be 1 mil. There’s also the rotary settings to do the stretching as a pre-process operation and you could just select everything and adjust that yourself.
But, 1 tick is still 1 tick. But, the official way to make 1000 ticks equal an 2 inches rather than 1in is to stretch the design 2x in that direction.
If the question is more properly about the step size within meerK40t if you replaced your stepper motor. It’s actually all pretty much defined based on the 1000 ticks = 1 inch dynamic. It would require some fundamental work to redefine the sizes of things if a step was 2 mils rather than 1 or a 1/10th mm step like you’d common find in embroidery.
I was not sure where to post this info but thought because @Tatarize has done a great job explaining the M2nano board that this would compliment the information. It is actually a repost from Scott Marshall that is found in the G+ posts.
Seems like good even if older information. I know the V4 version of the board had weirder stepper chips this data seems to suggest that it’s 4895 rather then 4988 like we find in the V9 version of the chip. The outline says it’s running V7 there.
The answer’s still generally no. But, I’m looking for a replacement stepper motor and some mostly compatible 1.8 deg one is really tempting. Then just rewrite the software to allow variable x and y. Needs some things like anyway.
